Osric Slowhand - Cinder-Wasp Keeper of Andisol

Introduction

Andisol eats because something carries the pollen. Sixteen hundred people live on fruit, flowers, grain and root out here in the green southwest, where the lava never reaches and the rain comes warm and often, and every single one of those crops needs a visitor before it will set. The visitors are cinder wasps, and cinder wasps are nobody's livestock. They are not gentle, they make nothing anyone wants to eat, and they will sting a man who moves wrong at the wrong hour of the wrong season. Osric Slowhand has spent thirty years standing very still among them, and Andisol's whole quiet prosperity rests on the fact that he keeps bothering to.

Profile

Name: Osric Slowhand
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Alignment: Neutral Good
Role/Class: Cinder-Wasp Keeper of Andisol
Challenge Rating: 1

"Stand still. They'll finish deciding about you long before you've finished deciding about them."

Appearance: Osric is a lean, sun-darkened man in his middle fifties, built narrow and a little stooped, with the deliberate, unhurried movement of someone who has trained every fast reflex out of himself on purpose. His forearms are mapped with old sting-nodes, pale raised beads under brown skin, dozens of them, and he displays them the way another man might display calluses. He wears a loose layered over-tunic of woven firecloth and gauze the color of weak tea, sleeves buttoned to the knuckle, with a broad soft hat and a veil he almost never bothers to lower. A hooked pole taller than he is rides in one hand at all times, used more for leaning and for lifting a branch than for anything else. He smells strongly and permanently of rendered emberfruit must, green wood, and wet leaf-litter. When he speaks, he leaves gaps.